With PAX being this week, I figured this would be a good time to talk about one of my favorite things about the event: playing lots of board games. Namely, that it is somehow really hard to do, at least it is for the kinds of games that I like to play. I really like more advanced board games, ones that take time to get good at and generally take 1-2 hours to complete a single game. My main problem is, I have a bunch of them, but I never get to play them.
LFG (Looking For Group)
If you want a real lecture on why finding people to play games with is hard, you should check out this panel from PAX. I’m just going to give a summary here focused on board games, since that’s the only area where I have trouble. Most video games I play are single player, so it’s not really an issue there. But, by default, board games require at least two people to play (well, the fun ones do). And to be fair, since my girlfriend likes playing these games too, two player games aren’t that hard. But getting to that third or fourth player (which a lot of games require) is tough.
It mostly comes down to the fact that I’m simply not popular enough to have people over on a regular basis. It’s not that I don’t have enough friends, I certainly do. I just can’t get enough of them to want to come over and play serious games. Whenever I do have friends over, it’s usually a lot at once, so we are forced to go more casual. Those games are fine and we have a good time, but I have several board games in my closet that I’ve bought and have not played once. That really sucks!
It has happened to me enough times now that I’ve started catching myself when I think about buying something that is only useful for groups. I got a huge dining table years ago in the hopes that it would be used for parties. It definitely has been good for parties, but I’m not entirely sure the frequency has justified the purchase. Same goes with the barbecue, it’s big enough to make food for dozens, but has only ever been used to cook for two. And it happened with board games, multiple times. I figured that if I had a bunch of cool games, people would want to come over and play them. Didn’t really happen that way, so I don’t buy them much anymore. I only buy games now that have good two player action.
I know that most of it is on me. If I really wanted to have people over to play these games, I could make it happen. I just don’t put it at a higher priority over most other things, so it doesn’t really change. For now I just accept that I should be more careful about what I buy, and maybe look into other avenues for getting more consistent gaming time.
So yeah, there isn’t much more to this post than saying that getting board games is only worthwhile if you are popular enough to have people over to play on a regular basis. It’s either that or spend all of your time at a game shop, which works too, but that’s not really for me. I just want to be able to use the stuff I’ve already got: lots of games and a huge table to play them on.
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So for the next three Mondays, I will be on vacation in Europe, meaning that I won’t have time to write stuff. But that's okay. Hopefully it will give me more things to write about. For sure there will be at least one post about the trip, maybe more depending on what inspires me. I might end up also doing a mini-post on how PAX and other gaming goes this weekend. We shall see!
See you all in a few weeks!